In November 1961 Allen W. Dulles resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ending a tenure as director that had spanned nearly a decade. On 17 April of that year, a brigade of Cuban exiles, armed and directed by the CIA, had landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an effort to topple the regime of Premier Fidel Castro. Within days, however, Castro's forces crushed the invasion, killing or capturing almost the entire brigade. Stunned by the disaster, newly elected President John F. Kennedy began to reconsider the advice that he had been receiving. Upon taking office from President Dwight D. Eisenhower only a few months before, Kennedy had asked Dulles, who had directed the CIA throughout the previous administration, to remain at the head of the agency. But in the wake of the Cuban debacle, Kennedy decided that it was time for the director of central intelligence to go.

‘Fiasco’ and ‘disaster’ are the two adjectives most commonly employed by analysts and commentators to describe the Bay of Pigs operation. It was an abortive attempt in April 1961 by a ‘Cuban Brigade’ (actually a force consisting of some 1,400 Cuban exiles), trained and armed by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to establish and hold several beachheads in and around the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) in Cuba. The objective of the exercise was to unseat Fidel Castro’s government, though there were important differences within the political, clandestine and military branches of the US government as to how precisely this was to be achieved. In the event these differences proved academic, as the Brigade was defeated within three days by Castro’s army, air force and militia. The vast majority of its surviving members were subsequently captured. They were to spend over 18 months in captivity before being returned to the US, in exchange for food and medicines, by Castro late in 1962.

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